Saturday, March 15, 2014

Stop & Shiver in It

Compulsive and futile weekend blogging: As promised, Theme Song March 2014. That song has been Theme Song of Month more than any other. No, I can't say how many times, that would be too compulsive even for me.

Two friends, one analog, one digital, have been urging me to give Star Trek: Deep Space Nine another chance. DS9 was my least favorite of the four shows for reasons I forget (I don't count Enterprise, which I've never seen and had and have no desire to see), though I remember thinking moving Worf to the show seemed a particularly desperate Hail Mary. But I trust the judgment of my friends and will give DS9 a new viewing. I watched the premier last night, things I had forgot: Sisco's wife was killed by Locutus; his son is motherfucking irritating; Dax is a trill; cameras will fixate on Kira's tits; the doctor is motherfucking irritating; Sisco will never call anyone Rockfish.

Of being numerous: In that image—where a desire for insurrectionary freedom is paired with
advanced technocapitalism’s ­surveillance-control apparatus—our current
problem is crystallized. The devices we rely upon to communicate and
gather information and build the solidarity necessary for contemporary
protests also offer us up as ripe for constant surveillance. The
surveillance state could not be upheld without its always already
trackable denizens. To sidestep our tacit complicity in this would be to
fail to recognize how deep it runs—it’s how we live. As my Salon
colleague Andrew Leonard noted, “In 2013, the negative consequences of
our contemporary lifestyles were impossible to ignore.”